"You start the Final Chapter with Rydia, Luca, That Man in Black and Edge. Your stats for those characters match those you bought over from their individual chapters so if you didn't play/complete those chapters you have an uphill struggle to catch up raising their levels as there are tough monsters. I had not completed Rydia's tale and when I tried the Final Chapter out, the girls dropped dead in the first battle."

Hmmm, so it would be a good idea to at least play through the stories of those four characters. I see, thanks. Is it possible to play the final chapter with the same characters that were used in the original... Cecil, Rosa, Edge, Kain and Rydia? Now that would be pretty cool...

I recently finished FFIV DS, and after deciding that more of the same would be rad, I've just splurged some cash on the intial download and four of the character tales. I'm about one hour into the game and I have a question about the DLC. I notice that you can access each individual tale from the menu screen. If I was to start playing one of them just now, would I be controlling characters other than Ceodore, or does your Ceodore stats transfer through to each tale?

I should just try it out, but if seems a bit disjointed, accessing storylines from the main menu rather than encountering them out in the world. Could someone give me a brief lowdown as to how this actually works?

@Hal: You're probably right. Although you'd think that it would be the actual developers themselves who would approach Nintendo about wanting to put their game on the virtual service. Or am I wrong there? Do Nintendo sometimes approach developers and ask them if they'd like the game to be re-released? What about games from companies no longer in business? What happens to those games? Anyone know the answers to these questions?

When the VC was announced, I had this wondrous vision of every game that I'd ever played as a kid, on various old-school consoles, being reborn and conveniently packaged in a downloadable format, available for to relive at any time of my choosing. Desert Strike, James Pond 2, Faxanadu, Duck Tales, NHLPA '93... no longer a fading nostalgic remnant of a memory, but right there, ready to be enjoyed again, at anytime. Whilst many of these cherished classics have been released, the service is not quite the fantasy land of retro gaming that I had first envisioned.

The "Coming Soon" list doesn't make for especially great reading, although my heart has been sufficiently warmed by the news that the mighty "Nintendo World Cup" will be hitting the service at some point. How many other football games allow you to actually kill the other team's players? It's an eye-bulging classic.

I recommend those of you who are peeved at the lack of quality games confirmed for '09 to be proactive about it and write to the developers who made the games that you want to see released. I would download the NES classic "Faxanadu" just to have the satisfaction of knowing that I once again own it (and to listen to the music, and with no indication that it's ever going to see the light of day on the VC, I took it upon myself to write to Hudson-Soft and ask them whether or not they would ever consider re-releasing it on the VC. Alright, they never actually technically got back to me (at all), but I feel better knowing that I've actually done something about it, and that suits at Hudson-Soft now know that at least one person wants to see the game live again in 2009 on the Nintendo Wii. If we all get our writing hats on and start pestering developers in a big big way, then our combined and concerted efforts might just begin to pay off.

OK folks, let's be honest here. At the risk of getting lynched, If you never owned a Commodore 64 and don't get that tingly nostalgic feeling whenever someone mentions the word "Paradroid", the likes of the Last Ninja series is probably not going to do anything for you. As a dispassionate (and slightly curmudgeonly) observer, I downloaded Last Ninja 2 a while back on a whim (and quite possibly on the recommendation of this site) and, playing it from the perspective of someone who first started playing games on the NES and Atari 2600, I found it slow, plodding, ugly and intensely boring. I think that these five star reviews that you give to such games should also state that if you didn't actually play the game in 1989 and don't get all wet just thinking about it, it very well might not be the game for you.

Don't get me wrong. I can totally understand why you give such games five stars. There are games that I can remember from my youth with such vivid fondness that, if I was in a position to review it for a public audience, I'd simply have to give it the absolute maximum mark allowed, even if I knew full well that the game perhaps didn't hold up so well 20 years later and that those who aren't looking at it through rose-tinted spectacles probably won't get anywhere near the same buzz out of it that I do.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with giving five stars to these old games that you enjoyed donkeys years ago. But I think that you should perhaps recognise in the review that you're not coming at them from a fresh perspective, and that years of dewey-eyed sentiment might just be creeping into the overall score.

As someone who has a European Wii, and whose PC is amazingly poor and wouldn't be able to handle the might of World of Goo, I am devastated about not being able to play it. That I'll won't be able to play it until NEXT YEAR, and even then at more than double the price the Americans are paying for it, is really quite sickening. Anyone other Europeans thinking of boycotting it?

"Just as well I put 5000 points on my Wii recently, may well check this out given the score and the fact I like a good thinking game..."

Only if you plan on downloading it in America- we Europeans are being denied the chace to play it on the Wii until next year, and even then not on the virtual console, but as a retail game that'll probably cost at least £20! Not that £20 will be too pricey for a game like this, but... next year! That's a nonsense.

Thanks for that. The revelation that the story's pretty much cookie-cutter material might prove tiresome after being spoiled with FE's great, stylised dialogue, and not being able to get accurate information with regards to how much damage I'll do to my opponents might also be a bit of a deal breaker. However, as the game's a reputed classic, and as I missed out on just about every RPG from the Mega-Drive era, I probably owe this game a fair crack of the whip. I'm off all next week, and I'll be giving it a bash. I'll post here to give my impressions. Cheers.

I am a huge fan of the two Fire Emblem games that came out for the GBA, and I ended up playing them both all the way through twice. Shining Force II does interest me, but I fear that I might have been spoiled by the newer and more modern Fire Emblem games. Is there a chance of someone who's a fan of the GBA Fire Emblem games finding Shining Force II to be a tad basic? I'm in the middle of playing both Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Castle Crashers, and I don't really want to be downloading another game right at the moment. However, if Shining Force II is able to rival GBA FE games, I'll simply need to get it and spend all night playing it!

I'm more familiar with the old Devil's Crush for the arcade as opposed to Alien Crush, although this game looks pretty different to that game, what with its updated 3D look. I especially like the pink, fleshy nature of the organic monsters (that I suspect will be getting hammered by the pinball), and it's sort of reminiscent of what you'd find in the Alien or Hellraiser series. Looking forward to this one!

XBLA has a wealth of great dual-stick controlled games- it's a tried and trusted control scheme that has been proven to work well. It could be a bit of a gamble from High Voltage to be mixing things up with waggle-based aiming, which I can see perhaps not being as fluid as the likes of XBLA's Geometry Wars and Assault Heroes, although I do like the vibrant look of it all and the copious amounts of blood strewn all over the place! The game just looks fun.

Yes! Track and Field is an absolutely classic NES game, and I would love it if Konami saw fit to release it on the VC. Summer Games looks very similar to Track and Field, but I would most likely just bemoan the fact that it's not T&F, the game that rocked my youth.

You're right of course, Bass XO- even if all nine (9) of the games that America have that we don't were to suddenly become available, I'd likely only download one or two, if any. The point though, is that it's bloody annoying that North America are somehow deemed fit to have a whopping nine more games available for download than us. It's not fair I tell you!

Wow Nintendo, what do you have against us Europeans?! Not content with America having seven (7) more WiiWare games than us, you had to go and give them yet another two! Even if the new games perhaps aren't of the most stunning quality, North America, nevertheless, now has a grand total of nine (9) more WiiWare games than our lot! Was it something we said?!

Perhaps when Nintendo actually do something about the ridiculous situation at present, whereby tens of my games are currently drifting around in cyberspace/oblivion because they will not all fit onto the Wii's paltry memory allotment, I might decide to accept his "apology"....

You're got to admire the man's honesty, although I'm not sure that coming out and saying that he's disappointed with the way that the game's turned out is the best way to go about things before the game has even been released. His candor is refreshing, but he could have perhaps waited until a decent amount of folk had laid down their 500 Wii points before telling us how much better it could have been! I've actually been a bit surprised by the glowing praise that the game has received thus far, as it looks to me like your standard, generic platforming fare, without anything much to distinguish it from the crowd. Of course, I might be way off. Nevertheless, I wasn't planning on buying it, and being told by the developer that it's not as good as he had envisioned isn't likely to persuade me otherwise!

I think that you did a good job explaining how the game actually plays; the "Lob Shot" sounds quite interesting, and the puzzles themselves seem to have a bit of variety. However, I'm holding out for Taito getting their act together and lavishing us with some motion-controlled Bust-a-Move.

Yes, Starwolf, the removal of games from XBLA that don't meet certain criteria is disappointing, and plagued with its own possible problematic outcomes. It's also an attempt, I think, to tidy up the woefully inept interface, which is so overcrowded with games and videos and demos that it's extremely hard to actually navigate and find what you're looking for. It seems to me that the removal of games that haven't sold too well has as much to do with clearing up the interface as it has to do with a serious attempt to get rid of garbage games. Absolutely, the XBLA service has its fair share of problems, but, in my view, they pale into insignificance next to the Wii's.

As the article says, Nintendo are lagging behind their console counterparts in various departments. The storage issue is a big, big concern for me personally, given that I'm going to be downloading a lot of WiiWare games in the coming months, and given that I already own about thirty Virtual Console games (some of which I've recently had to erase from my console to make more room, which I was none too pleased about). Even if I can download them again at a later date, there's something about that whole procedure which just doesn't sit right with me.

Something that hasn't been spoken of here, but which is also disappointing many gamers, is the lack of voice chat when playing Wii games on-line, and this is something that will afflict WiiWare games as well. I didn't used to think that it was that much of a big deal- but when you've been playing Call of Duty 4 for months on your 360, having a blast chatting with your friends whilst you're at it- the sterile, eerie silence that you encounter when you switch over to the Wii's on-line service is incredibly jarring, and extremely off-putting. There was only so much Mario Kart Wii on-line that I could stomach before the deathly silence and lobby that was utterly bereft of atmosphere sent me scrambling back to the 360.

So yes, quite a few problems for Nintendo to address, although with the money absolutely rolling in for them at the moment, the question is: Will they bother?

"I'll wait for your review Wiiware World, and that will be my deciding factor. Thanks =)"

No pressure, then!

I absolutely adored Sid Meyer's Pirates!, and I'm going to have to put all of my preconceived notions of that great little game to one side when I download this one on Friday. The Key of Dreams bears more than a superficial resemblance to "Pirates!", although whether the actual gameplay is at all strategic or more action-based remains to be seen. I'm not that bothered as long as what's there is good. Time will tell.

This is only the second WiiWare game that I've managed to spend an extended period of time playing, and it's a lot better than I expected it to be. I literally couldn't stop playing it last night, going on a mad six hour marathon until the wee hours of the morning. I generally play games in short bursts, and the only other games that can have me playing for that amount of time are the likes of Football Manager and GTA IV- it's that addictive. In fact, I'm enjoying it so much that I can see myself laying down more Wii points for the extra downloadable content, which I never thought I'd even consider. The game has just been charming the pants off of me, and I'm almost afraid to start another session tonight in case I'm at it for another six hours. I liked Lost Winds a lot, but this game just gives me a better feeling whilst I'm playing it; that special, joyful, can't-quite-put-your-finger-on-it feeling that you only get from a really well-crafted video game. Hats off to Square Enix- those dudes know what they're doing.

Gah- I just can't get into this sort of fake money, video game hustling. When you can play Blackjack for free on the internet the prospect of stumping up 5 quid and half your memory just doesn't appeal. At all.

The fact that you can see what answer the other team are pointing at with their Wii remotes sounds as though it could either be really fun or really annoying. If it's a proper test of general knowledge you're after then it'll likely be the latter, although I can see how it might be fun to "throw the other team off" by feigning to choose a wrong answer. The Mario Kart-esque random factor with the Wheel of Fortune also sounds a bit dodgy for my money.

Nevertheless, this sounds like the sort of game that might be fun after a few shandies with your friends! Extremely readable, informative review, Collin, well done.

Well, I for one am glad that Ninty have released this in its original form, although it would have been nice if they'd whacked World Cup Italia '90 and Super Hang-On on the same download, as that was a popular 3-in-1 combo pack back in the day! Of course, why do that when you can offload those other games in future standalone releases for wads more cash! <br> <br>